


file, save

by thir13enth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Timelines, F/M, Slow Burn, angst overall, but the story is more like a smile with sad eyes, canon-verse post s2, haven't figured out if this is a happy ending or not, more or less from allura's pov, promise some fluff and heartwarming scenes, written before s3 was released, you know what i mean?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 13:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11760603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thir13enth/pseuds/thir13enth
Summary: She’s not strong enough to bend time — but maybe for him, she is.—shallura, for voltron big bang 2017.





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**Author's Note:**

> forgive me for ever believing that I could actually write a multi-chap
> 
> accompanying art (to come in later chapters!) by the most wonderful [leighanief](leighanief.tumblr.com) on tumblr.

They see that he’s gone, and then suddenly everyone becomes a wandering soul.

Maybe they share a collective gasp — eyes wide, brows narrow, hearts still, breaths caught — and maybe there’s a soft whimper — because this… _this_ is their first true failure as so-proclaimed Defenders of the Universe — but mostly there’s just silence.

Silence is the only thing that Allura hears, an incessant buzzing at the back of her mind that distracts her from thinking… thinking what? What is there to think about? Her mind is so scattered that she can’t figure out where to start pondering in her confusion. She can see everyone moving: Keith is yelling, Pidge is searching, Lance is holding his head, Coran is pacing, Hunk is waving… waving at her but she doesn’t process and she doesn’t move and she doesn’t know what to do and she doesn’t know what to think...

Then the ringing in Allura’s ears fade, and when she’s come back to place, she realizes everyone’s gone, the Castle’s night cycle has started, the mental chatter she shares with the Altean mice has quieted — and she’s still standing in Black’s cockpit and _the Black Paladin is still not there_.

She blinks. Once, maybe twice, and she rubs her tired eyes again before staring back down at the empty pilot seat in front of her and snaps out of her denial.

Mindlessly, she folds her arms and walks out of the Black Lion. She doesn’t feel like herself in any way — how long was she just _standing_ there? How long had it been before everyone left her to herself?  It wasn’t at all  like Coran to leave her alone when she was upset, but maybe she just looked so distraught or maybe she just didn’t hear him call her name or touch her shoulder for so long that he decided to let her be.

Standing still and frozen is not like her at all. There was only one other time she turned off the world and sat inside of herself for hours on end, and that was when she was ten thousand years late to realizing it in the first place.

She was never ready to lose someone else. She’s still putting together the pieces from when she pulled the plug on her own father, and sometimes she still wakes up to all kinds of feelings she can’t describe properly in Altean or any of the myriad of languages she’s ever been taught to speak.

It’s something like what she feels now. She feels lost in a place she’s called home, feels empty when her heart is so tight and dense, feels dead when she knows she can only feel if she is alive — and soon step by step, she walks beyond her routine path to her bedroom and her feet take her to depths within the Castle she’s never seen before.

She doesn’t mind the wandering. The Castle of Lions never ceases to amaze her — a true work of wonder even for the technological prowess Altea boasted — and either she’s so struck by the architecture or so struck by everything that just happened that for a moment, she escapes from her age and turns to her curiosity.

And at the end of this long dimly lit corridor, there is just one single door.

The door doesn’t part when she stands in front of it, and she wonders if she’s in a part of the Castle that doesn’t recognize her. Ever since reawakening from the cryopod, every inch of the Castle has given way in her presence, and approaching a door that doesn’t slide automatically open for her brings her back to when she was just 500 million ticks old.

It’s also locked, she realizes, when she tries to pull the door open. She tries again, with a little more strength in her shoulder, but nothing gives.

“Open,” she snarls, and it’s been so long since she’s spoken that she doesn’t recognize her own voice.

But the Castle does, and the door opens.

The air inside is heavy and unmoving, as if the walls within have been holding their breath for centuries. The room is dark, save the soft light that comes in from the hallway, and it is quiet, except for the occasional hiss of a machine.

It sounds like breathing.

“Shiro?” she asks. She’s not sure why his name comes up.

She’s not sure of many other things either. Like why she snaps her fingers or why the lights flicker on when she does. Or why she is more curious about the single chair in the center of the room than about the fact that the door slides shut behind her. It doesn’t matter.

The metal chair looks like a throne, so large it looks uncomfortable yet so spacious it looks inviting. There’s enough wear on the edge of its seat and on the surface of its armrests for her to know the chair was used, but she can’t tell for what.

And so, she sits down. She doesn’t think before she does it, because thinking is too tiring and because filling the chair with her body feels better than staring at yet another empty seat.

She doesn’t think, even as the chair vibrates underneath her, so strong that her teeth chatter in the back of her jaw, or even as something whirs and hums just above her, the noise growing closer and closer to her ears with every tick.

Blackness seeps from the edge of the walls and slowly floods the room, and then suddenly she’s ankle deep in a sea of dark pixels and something descends onto her shoulders and fits around her head and for a moment she can’t see and she can’t breathe but she is not afraid and she doesn’t care because her heart is still and because what the hell else could go horribly wrong when the worst has already happened, when Shiro is —

“And so I use Black as bait,” he explains, highlighting a new path on the dashboard with a metal finger. “The teludav can be right behind Black, and as long as Zarkon goes in full velocity toward Black, we can operate as we planned with the Blade of Marmora and shoot Zarkon on five hundred million light years away.”

— when Shiro is…

Her pause is too long. He furrows his eyebrows and looks up at her. “Princess?”

And when she sees his eyes — with that same soft glint, with that same concerned crinkle in the corner, with that same shade of brown so dark she could see her shocked face reflected in it — her heart beats again.

She breathes in. “I…”

The air feels all too familiar. The moment feels like it already happened.

But this isn’t a memory. This _can’t_ be a memory. She sees, hears, feels things that she would never remember — the constellations in the sky beyond the glass windows of the command room, the light static over the intercom from her earrings, the tight stretch of her leggings as she steps back — when she knows that she wouldn’t remember anything about this moment except the small frown on his face, her name in his voice, his hand reaching out to her shoulder...

It’s all too real. It’s all too much. She isn’t dreaming, she realizes. She isn’t remembering. She’s _reliving_.

This is _yesterday_.

“Princess?” he asks again, voice raised. He steps forward.

“No,” she says sternly, with another step backwards. She knows better than to fall into this trap. She knows better than to give to her senses. “No!”

She squeezes her eyes shut, crouches down, raises her hands up to clutch her head. Her fingers become a fist but she doesn’t feel her hair being clasped, she feels a hard smooth surface just around her head and that’s just wrong because she doesn’t _feel_ like there’s something around her head but she pulls whatever this is off of her head anyway and she reminds herself that —

no, she isn’t in the command room, she’s in some empty dark space she’s never been in.  
no, she isn’t planning where to steer the Castle, she’s already done it and everything has already gone wrong.  
no, Shiro is not right there in front of her, he is _gone._ He is —

“Fuck,” she curses, feeling her legs stand herself up from the chair.

The helmet in her hands clatters to the ground.

[(link to leighanief's art for this scene here!)](https://leighanief.tumblr.com/image/164010149362)

Even the flickering dim lights of the room are too bright for her eyes at first. She squints until she can see but even through her eyelashes, she can tell that everything is back to where she first started:

Lost. Empty. Dead.

Somehow, her feet know the way to her bed, and tonight, she is more scared of her dreams than her nightmares.


End file.
